Tiny Town: A bird eye view of responding to a fire
Anchorage Fire Department prepares for wildfire season
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Anchorage Fire Department is preparing for what could be a spring and summer filled with wildfires across the state after South Central saw little snowfall this winter.
“With a lack of snow and a lot of available fuel, dry grass, things they didn’t receive a lot of moisture. Unless there’s moisture that comes in, those fuels will continue to be dry,” Josh Leutzinger, with the Anchorage Fire Department, said. “Unless there’s moisture that comes in, those fuels will continue to be dry.”
Those fuels could potentially start fires across the Anchorage Bowl. On Tuesday, to prepare in case of that emergency, crew members participated in the department’s annual wildfire refresher training. They underwent a wildfire simulation in the department’s “Tiny Town,” which gives crew members a bird’s-eye view of the city.
“We spend about 13 bucks. We made some land-made photos, aerial shots. We have yarn spread out. We have cardboard with pictures of houses and different words on them to steer people’s decision-making on the structures,” Leutzinger said. “All of this is meant to paint a picture for our responders, to what kind of variables they could encounter when they are responding to a scene like this.”
On Tuesday, crew members worked together to strategize and act out how they could respond in case there was a fire in the Hillside neighborhood of Anchorage.
“We are using this to pre-plan and train,” Capt. Fred Kilheffer of the Anchorage Fire Department said. “When we are able to take a large geographic area and put it down into something that we can train on, it gives us an opportunity to gain situational awareness of how one part of the town interacts with another part of the town.”
The training featured people acting as instant commanders as well as those whose roles focused on logistics, planning, and finance. After the simulation, crew members also received additional training in the classroom, where they discussed updates for the 2025 season.
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